One of the most powerful experiences of embarking on a spiritual journey is learning that there is no separation between the spiritual and physical realms. Spirit is unseen, but it is still an aspect of the physical. they are not separate, but one is intrinsic to the experience of the other.
Organized religion creates the illusion of separation between Earth and spirit by placing religious leaders squarely between us and god. The leaders insist that the only way to reach god is by conforming to a rigid set of rituals and beliefs and by rejecting anything that does not conform to that blueprint.
Self-sovereignty is the opposite of religious conformity. In a state of self-sovereignty, the individual knows they are intrinsically divine and, as such, directly connected with god. Even the definition of god cannot stay the same. Because if each person can connect with god and we are all one, connected by mother earth, then how can we deny the divinity in each person?
After a lifetime of religious and societal conditioning, it takes a major shift to stop looking outside for the answers and to start looking within. It takes a great deal of faith in our own intuition to know that no one holds the answers to our unique questions but our own higher self. The self that is aligned with our own divine authority and not seeking validation from outside sources.
This is not an egotistical, pride-based mentality. It’s simply the eradication of self-doubt. It’s remaining open to learning from others while remaining grounded in inner knowing. It’s understanding god as a decentralized concept, rather than as a singular authoritative judge oriented outside of ourselves.
Organized religion is a superstructure that uses hierarchy to block the individual’s direct connection with god by rendering us dependent upon outside authority for divine guidance. Yet, the guidance dispensed by religious authorities is anything but divine.
Spirituality, conversely, is the act of the individual connecting directly with spirit, without an intermediary. As such, spirituality and organized religion are directly at odds.
Spirit is the formless aspect of our human experience—the metaphysical—the unseen aspects of our world. Yet, being unseen makes them no less real. Take music, a vibration that passes through space and time and flows into our ears without ever entering into the visible plane.
Convincing me that I can only access spirit by way of someone else would be as hard as convincing me that I can only hear music via someone else’s ears.
Coincidentally, music and spirit are ruled by the same house in astrology—the 12th house—which rules all things that are unseen and hidden from the naked eye. The 12th house is the domicile of Pisces who rules the formless, spirit, emotion, intuition, and the deepest depths of the sea.
It’s with this understanding that we begin to see the true illusion—the one that tells us that the only way to gain access to god is through an institutional authority. When in fact, all we have to do is remove the plugs which were placed in our spiritual ears in early childhood.
While a spiritual journey seeks the expansion of consciousness through exploring the unknown, religion demands conformity to a static set of rules and deference to an Earthly authority to gain access to god. The Pope, for example, a cult leader, or a pastor at a local church.
Whereas spirituality demands us to trust our inner knowing and move in our personal truth, religion claims that we must doubt ourselves and even insists that we are inherently evil by nature (Genesis 8:21) and therefore we must defer to an outside authority, selected by the church, for guidance.
This is why organized religions hate people who bypass their leaders to connect directly with divine guidance. Like Marguerite Porete who wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls, a mystical text describing a soul’s union with god without need for the Church or clergy. She was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310.
Later they killed Joan of Arc who heard god’s voice instructing her to lead France. They burned her at the stake in 1431 only to ironically exonerate her in a posthumous re-trial in 1456 and canonize her in 1920. She was too popular to not appropriate. Besides, with the separation of the physical from the spiritual, men can commit grave sins, as long as they ask for forgiveness later.
Countless others have met the same fate for similar or lesser “crimes”, the crime of practicing the inherent ability of each human being to connect directly with the spiritual realm.
Religious leaders consider it a capital offense to claim that you have spoken with god directly because it exposes the illegitimacy of their only claim to power—the ability to mediate between god and mankind.
The widespread establishment of Abrahamic religions is precisely what has cut humanity off from spirit and played a decisive role in the subjugation of the feminine, of women, and of Mother Earth.
The epoch of masculine domination made sure that connection with spirit would be severed, because connection with spirit is connection with our feminine nature. Only by disconnecting from that divine feminine nature could industrialization, colonialism, and patriarchy take root across the globe.
By exploiting the innate human desire to connect with the divine, the church found a way to control people’s minds. By claiming to be the only link with the divine and by using fear and intimidation against anyone who dared disagree, the church steadily brainwashed humanity convincing us to give up our divinity under threat of death.
We live in an era of increasing spiritual awareness. After centuries of this rubbish, people are hungry for direct connection with spirit. Yet, we are still conditioned to doubt ourselves. Many of us are still convinced that we need a leader to tell us what is right and wrong.
But the moment we defer to a “spiritual leader” as the final word on our own personal direction, or trust someone else’s intuition above our own, a hierarchy has formed and we have placed a barrier between ourself and our direct connection with spirit.
Self-sovereignty requires a great deal of integrity and an unshakable intuition, free of self-doubt, developed over time by trial and error. Through ups and downs and ongoing realignment and recalibration, we learn through experience what is rooted in self-trust and what is a hangover from religious trauma or conditioning.
That’s why becoming comfortable with the unknown is step one in the process of decoding religious trauma and stepping onto our own autonomous spiritual path. By becoming comfortable with the unknown, we become comfortable with spirit.
Religions often carry kernels of truth, such as the concept that our carnal minds will never full grasp or understand everything on the spiritual plane in this physical lifetime. That’s actually true. And that’s okay.
By becoming comfortable with the unknown, it’s easier to accept that no one has all the answers and that what might be true for me may not be true for someone else.
Accepting the reality of the spiritual unknown helps protect us from the ego trap, a risk any human may fall prey to and often leads to spiritual psychosis (which we could also just call psychosis).
Because here is no separation between the physical and spiritual, when connecting deeper with spirit, we can never forget that our physical journey is an intrinsic part of our spiritual journey. The two are are inseparable.
Thus, everything that we do in the physical realm is actually a spiritual act. Every physical experience is also a spiritual one and by taking care of our physical bodies, we are taking care of our spirit.
Yogis have known this for millennia. After all, “yoga” means union between the body, mind, and spirit. The union of the individual self (atman) with the universal consciousness (Brahman).
It’s within that union where we find the perfect balance between masculine and feminine energies. Where the feminine is the spiritual and the masculine is physical. The masculine gives form to the formless, but the masculine cannot connect with the divine without the feminine. The feminine, similarly, cannot stay rooted in the physical without the masculine.
Do not interpret this to mean that only a man and a woman can engage in divine union. That is a deeply capitalistic and patriarchal concept which denies the validity of human relationships, except for those that produce more human capital for usage in the industrial machine.
These concepts make more sense once we divorce them from gender—gender being a construct invented by organized religion and the state to reduce human relations to only those which are productive.
Yet, only the female body carries the womb—the portal between the heavens and the earth. The womb is the gateway that all humans must pass through in order to enter into the physical realm.
But using the womb for child-bearing is not the only way for a woman to engage with her divine nature. Rather, the womb signifies the creative life-force innate to feminine beings.
Similarly, it is only by entering deeper into our feminine energies, regardless of assigned gender, that we are able to enter into divine consciousness.
The Lovers card in the Smith-Waite tarot deck depicts this relationship between feminine, masculine, and spirit.
The man, confined to the carnal realm, looks to the woman on his right, the divine link between heaven and earth. The woman looks not back at the man, but up to the angel above her, significant of her ability to see god.
The angel is Raphael, the archangel of the air element, personifying the superconscious. He pours down benedictions on the two figures below. The man in the picture represents the conscious mind, ruled by masculine energy, and the woman represents the subconscious mind, ruled by feminine energy.
The truth conveyed is that the conscious mind cannot approach the superconscious unless it passes through the subconscious.
Thus, it’s no coincidence that in patriarchal religions, the feminine is dethroned, even demonized, and stripped of her divinity. The proponents of patriarchy wish to assume that divine connection as their own. And they try to take it by force.
The Bible wastes no time in making this goal clear. It is in Genesis 2:18 when Eve is created as an afterthought by the biblical god from one of Adam’s ribs because he was lonely… And then holds her responsible for the expulsion of mankind from the mythical Garden of Eden, thereby making her at fault for the state of human suffering.
However, unable to deny that women create life, after casting them from paradise, the god of the Bible curses the woman to experience great pain in child birth as punishment for straying from obedience to the patriarch.
Patriarchal religious authority thereby rests squarely upon the demonization of the feminine in order to manufacture legitimacy.
The hundreds of thousands of women who were tortured by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in Europe and thousands more later in the colonies bear witness to this centuries-long effort by the church and state to eliminate powerful women and steal their property and possessions.
And this is where we begin to understand the role of the state as intrinsic to the rise of organized religion. The Inquisition cost a lot of money and it was the state which funded it. Church and State are simply two sides of the same coin.
The church first gained control over peoples’ minds, then the state enforced the rules of the church by force, being the entity which holds a monopoly on violence.
And it was from this backdrop that the rising tide of colonialism emerged out of Europe and swept across the planet. This same organized religion sanctioned the enslavement and deaths of millions of people across the globe who worshiped the Old Gods, the Mother, and the Earth.
In fact, the entire colonial project would have been impossible without the role of the church. Throughout history, kings and colonial rulers have claimed to be ordained by God to legitimize their authority. It’s known as the Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
The Doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings is a political and religious theory asserting that monarchs derive their authority to rule directly from God, not from any earthly authority such as the people, a parliament, or the nobility.
Kings were only considered legitimate upon receiving the blessing of the church. In a pre-secular world wherein people still placed God above man, people would only defer to those men whom they recognized as ordained by God.
King David (1,000 BCE) claimed to be chosen and anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. Emperor Constantine (306–337 CE) used divine favor to justify his rule and Christianize the Roman Empire which then became known as the Holy Roman Empire.
For this reason, in every European nation, various church factions have ruthlessly grappled for power and authority over the state regime. Being the sole religion of the state ensured that the group of men leading that branch of the church gained ultimate power.
The state and church work to keep each other in power: the state needs the church to tell people who to obey, and the church needs the state to use brute force against anyone who dares to stray. Yet, this structure is absolutely no different today.
Despite the popularity of atheism and the pervasive belief that democracy has created an equal society, all of the features which brought the church and state into power are still firmly in place and, in fact, intrinsic to the modern political system. The myth of separation between church and state is one I will never subscribe to.
TO BE CONTINUED…